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SubjectRe: PATCH for 2.3.29: block device setup cleanup.
Linus writes:

> I do want character devices too, but I think we should consider block
> devices and character devices to be completely separate things.

> Not only are the number mappings different: character device X,Y is NOT
> necessarily the same as block device X,Y at all

Both you and Marcin sound as if you haven't seen this my letter on this topic
from a few months ago - see

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9910.0/0926.html

: At present MKDEV is just a simple arithmetical operation, but the new
: MKDEV must return the struct that belongs to the given major and minor.
: But there are two of them! A block device and a character device.
: Presently this last bit of information is implicitly present -
: in drivers/block one talks about block devices, in drivers/char
: about character devices. But we'll need it explicitly.
: Thus, I have patches like
:
:--- ../linux-1.3.84/linux/arch/sparc/kernel/setup.c Mon Mar 4 07:49:56 1996
:+++ ./linux/arch/sparc/kernel/setup.c Mon Apr 8 01:17:42 1996
:...
:- ROOT_DEV = MKDEV(UNNAMED_MAJOR, 255); /* NFS */
:+ ROOT_DEV = MKBDEV(UNNAMED_MAJOR, 255); /* NFS */
:
: that change all calls of MKDEV() into either MKBDEV() or MKCDEV()
: or MKXDEV(), where the latter occurs in a fs context, reading
: special device nodes.

You see, this is again an intermediate stage of the kind you disliked:
saying explicitly everywhere in the source whether a MKDEV makes a block device
or a character device, while, for the time being, while the rest of the work
is not done yet, each of MKBDEV, MKCDEV and MKXDEV have the same definition,
namely the present definition of MKDEV.
Doing this is a single pass over the kernel source, completely trivial work.
It does not achieve anything in itself, but makes it possible to do the real
work touching only a few source files. Later one wants to remove almost all
calls to MK[BC]DEV (since these are expensive now). This mostly involves not
forgetting what we know already. This also implies that the pointer to the
entire block device must be easily obtainable from the pointer to a partition,
a favourite reason for doing MKDEV is MKDEV(MAJOR(dev),MINOR(dev)&~mask),
and such calls must be entirely eliminated. I think the final result is more
efficient than our present code.


Andries

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